Farrell Till discusses miracle claims with Theo, a Christian apologist. From the Errancy Discussion list, 7-25-99:
TILL
This shows how very little you know about historiography. Historians do not automatically assume that an ancient document is telling the truth unless there are reasons to suspect otherwise. The information in ancient documents is subjected to very rigorous methods of evaluation to try to determine if there are sufficient reasons to accept the information as historical fact. What serious historiography would accept as historical fact that the emperor Vespasian healed a blind man and a man with a withered hand, just because both Tacitus and Suetonius reported that he did in their historical writings? I'm afraid you have been reading too many Josh McDowellian apologetic works.
THEO
Mr. Till, in your debate against Norman Geisler, you seemed to insinuate that we were to evaluate the evidence in the NT by the laws of jurisprudence used in the courtroom. You claimed that since the NT testimonies of the Resurrection of Christ are not(sic) eyewitness testimonies, then we are to reject them as hearsay.
TILL
Actually, I indicated that the testimony of these people should be treated as any other hearsay evidence, didn't I? The facts that (1) it was hearsay testimony and that (2) the testimony concerned an extraordinary claim that is completely contrary to reality as we know it through our own personal experiences are sufficient for any reasonable person to reject it. Only a very gullible person would think that hearsay testimony that a dead person had returned to life should be accepted as factual. If someone today told you that somebody had told him that someone had risen from the dead, how much credence would you give to such a claim? Not very much, I'm sure, but if such a claim is 2,000 years old, you swallow it hook, line, and sinker. Is that your idea of rationality?
THEO
You claimed that this was a rudimentary fact even used by Judge Wapner on People's Court.
TILL
Yes, that's right. Did you watch this program very much? If so, you surely heard him say this, because it was a comment that he made fairly often when any of the litigants would say that someone else had told them such and so.
THEO
Are you going to use this courtroom scenario only in the area of hearsay and not in the the area of proving these men to be liars "beyond a reasonable doubt?"
TILL
By "these men," I assume you mean the apostles. In the first place, I don't have to prove that they were liars, because I don't even have their firsthand testimony. I don't know, for example, what, if anything, the apostle Peter said on the day of Pentecost, because we have no testimony from Peter that he said what Luke said that he said. In the book of Acts, we have only the secondhand word of Luke that Peter said such and so and that Paul said such and so, etc. Secondhand testimony is hearsay and by its very nature of being hearsay is widely recognized as inherently weak evidence. I will repeat again that when you add to the hearsay nature of most of the "testimony" in the NT the fact that most of it also was concerned with extraordinary claims, the only sensible conclusion for a rational person to reach is that this kind of "evidence" is far too insufficient to prove the claims involved. Would you mind telling us if you apply to other ancient documents the same standards that you apparently apply to the Bible? In other words, if nonbiblical ancient documents contain various supernatural claims, do you just accept these as truth? If not, what standards do you use to determine what is true and what is not true when extraordinary claims are found in ancient documents?
THEO
As for the claim about Emperor Vespasian, I do not know whether he healed a blind man with a withered hand. I have never looked at those historical documents.
TILL
I can give you the exact references. The claim by Tacitus can be found in *The Histories* (Penguin Books, 1995, translated by Kenneth Wellesley, p.272), and the parallel claim by Suetonius is in *The Twelve Caesars* (Penguin Books, 1984, translation by Robert Graves, p. 284). If you would like me to, I can post various miracle claims that Tacitus, Suetonius, and Josephus made in their nonbiblical writings, as well as Islamic miracle claims, so that you can tell us which ones you accept as historical truth and which ones you reject and why. That would give us an idea of whether you know anything about this subject at all or if you are just another would-be apologist who is going to do nothing but recycle warmed-over materials from Geisler, McDowell, Archer, Arndt, and such like.
THEO
However, I must point out that you quoted this portion in response to my claim that we should more or less accept what documents say about non-supernatural events until we can prove the documents to be inaccurate. Hence, your statement about Vespasian has nothing to do with that particular argument I had made.
TILL
I will say again that you are showing that you know very little about historiography. Critics do not automatically accept the ordinary claims of ancient documents just because there is no evidence that the claims are not true. If you wish, I can forward to you articles from my journal *The Skeptical Review* in which William Sierichs discussed "nonsupernatural" claims made by Herodotus and other ancient historians, and showed that many of these claims have been rejected by modern historians.Your claim is simply not true. I realize that what you are saying is what you have heard "apologists" like Geisler and McDowell say, because I have heard them say the same thing. What they are trying to do is dupe people into believing that it is an almost universal principle of historical criticism to "give ancient documents the benefit of the doubt," so that they can later leap from the ordinary to the extraordinary in hopes that their readers and listeners will be willing to apply the same standard to these claims too. Conscientious historians, however, have never just automatically given the benefit of the doubt even to ordinary claims in ancient documents without first critically assessing these claims.
THEO
The New Testament writers had no earthly thing to gain (except martyrdom) by describing the miracles of Christ; Vespasian, on the other hand, could gain political power and prestige.
TILL
Well, in the first place, you're completely confused about who said what. I don't know of a single record that Vespasian himself left in which he claimed that he cured a blind man and a man with a withered hand. Tacitus and Suetonius were Roman historians who wrote these claims about miracles that Vespasian had allegedly performed. Furthermore, they both claimed (as you will see if you bother to check the sources cited above) that these miracles were seen by many witnesses. Furthermore, you indicate that NT writers were risking their very lives by describing miracles attributed to Jesus. I'd like to see your evidence to prove that these writers faced such dangers. I'm afraid you have been duped by too much preaching about horrible persecutions that early Christians suffered.
THEO
Also, the New Testament descriptions of events correspond to a large extent to the same events as mentioned in Josephus' "Antiquities" (e.g. the famine mentioned in Acts 11:28 is also told of in Antiquities 20:51-3, 101; Herod's death in Acts 12:23, Antiquities 19:343-52.)
TILL
Well, not exactly. The version of Herod Agrippa's death in Acts claims that because the people shouted words of praise to him after he had delivered a speech, "an angel of the Lord immediately struck him... and he was eaten of worms and gave up the ghost." The only real similarity in Josephus's account is that the crowd shouted praise to him, which caused Agrippa to see an ominous omen in the form of an owl. Agrippa interpreted this as a sign that he would die, and according to Josephus he returned to his chamber, suffered pain "in his belly for five days"and died. Nothing was mentioned about an angel of the Lord or immediacy or worms. At any rate, if your version of *Antiquities* is the same as mine, it has a footnote that discusses critical suspicions that this account may have been altered to give it at least some similarity to the account in Acts. There is nothing in Josephus's account to indicate that the supernatural was involved in the death of Agrippa, and that brings us to a point that you will be hearing quite often in this forum if you continue your effort to establish the inerrancy of the NT by pointing to characters or events that were corroborated or semi-corroborated (as in the case of Agrippa's death) by nonbiblical records. No one that I know of in this forum has ever argued that EVERYTHING in the NT is erroneous and that there is no truth at all in it. We recognize that several characters mentioned were undoubtedly real people, that many social customs referred to were accurate descriptions of the times, that geographical areas mentioned were accurate, etc. BUT--and this is an important but--there has never been any archaeological discovery or ancient record or archive found that has given unbiased, disinterested, contemporary corroboration of ANY of the many miracle claims found in the Bible. If I am wrong about this, I'd like to see the information you have that corroborates biblical miracles claims.
So try to keep in mind that when you talk about information in the Bible that has received extrabiblical corroboration, you are talking about the ordinary and not the extraordinary. That ordinary information in an ancient document would turn out to be historically accurate would not be at all surprising. There is undoubtedly much ordinary information in ancient Egyptian, Assyrian, Babylonian, etc. records that is historically accurate, but just as historians reject the fantastic and fabulous in the ancient records of Egypt, Assyria, Babylon, Greece, etc., the truly objective and impartial reader of history will reject the same type of information that is found in the Bible. The fact that something is claimed in the Bible should not give it privileged status.
THEO
There is also evidence that Luke's two volume work was written early: 1.) Acts never mentions destruction of Jerusalem--circa 70. (even though it is predicted in Luke 21:20-4!) 2.) Paul's and Peter's deaths not recorded. (prob. 64-70) 3.) The death of James, Christ's brother, is not recorded.--circa 62 (c.f. Antiquities, Book 20, Chapter 9 Section 1 in William Whiston's translation) 4.) The massacre of Christians in Rome not mentioned (circa 64.) Also, the first person plural throughout Acts indicates that it was written by someone who travelled with the Apostles and could have easily been in a position to interview eyewitnesses. The Book of John claims to be written by an eyewitness, (John 21:24 c.f. references to the "disciple that Jesus loved, no doubt a modest self-reference) and the skeptic will usually hide behind the veil of contemporary scholarship and dismiss this statement a priori.
TILL
Tell me something. If you wanted to forge a manuscript and make people think that it was written in World War II, would you refer to the assassination of John F. Kennedy or the presidency of Dwight Eisenhower or the collapse of communism in the Soviet Union?! If you'll think about what I'm asking, you should understand why I don't see your examples as any kind of substantial evidence that these books were written as early as you claim. As for John's claim that he was an "eyewitness," are you so naive that you can't see that if someone years after the event decided to write a book and give it credibility among Christians, he could easily decide to leave in it the impression that it was written by John. There is an epistle to the Laodiceans that claims that it was written by the apostle Paul, but even Christianity has rejected it. So even your own cohorts don't accept everything as authentic just because it internally claimed that it was written by persons of respect and authority. This matter is far more complex than you apparently recognize. If you stay on the list for long, you will have the opportunity to present your case and have it shot down. I'm saying this from years of experience with people like you who have come onto this list making the same claims (it's really sort of amazing how that you fellows just recycle the same old discredited nonsense) only to have their balloons burst by critical analysis of what they are claiming.
I'm going to make a final point before I post this. I noticed that a long list of messages from you came through, but I have not opened them yet. From just this one posting, I can already see that you are probably someone who intends to use the "stacking" strategy. Stacking occurs in debating when an opponent fills a speech or manuscript with a long series of unsupported or unsubstantiated assertions that he knows his opponent will not have time to reply to, so I want to tell you right at the beginning that you are talking to an old, experienced debater who knows all of the tricks. If I see that you are doing this, I'm going to take your assertions one at a time and demand that you prove them. No matter how much you may try to steer the discussion off to other assertions by trying to stack again, I won't let you do it. I'll keep bringing you back to the assertion that you have yet to prove. Now in the letter that you sent to me, you recycled that old, worn-out, discredited claim that the apostles and early evangelists were willing to suffer and die for their beliefs. I'm going to insist that you stick to this for the time being and prove that this is a true claim. If you can't prove it, then the argument with which you introduced yourself fails. Then we can go on to a second assertion and then a third and then a fourth.
Farrell Till
TILL
This shows how very little you know about historiography. Historians do not automatically assume that an ancient document is telling the truth unless there are reasons to suspect otherwise. The information in ancient documents is subjected to very rigorous methods of evaluation to try to determine if there are sufficient reasons to accept the information as historical fact. What serious historiography would accept as historical fact that the emperor Vespasian healed a blind man and a man with a withered hand, just because both Tacitus and Suetonius reported that he did in their historical writings? I'm afraid you have been reading too many Josh McDowellian apologetic works.
THEO
Mr. Till, in your debate against Norman Geisler, you seemed to insinuate that we were to evaluate the evidence in the NT by the laws of jurisprudence used in the courtroom. You claimed that since the NT testimonies of the Resurrection of Christ are not(sic) eyewitness testimonies, then we are to reject them as hearsay.
TILL
Actually, I indicated that the testimony of these people should be treated as any other hearsay evidence, didn't I? The facts that (1) it was hearsay testimony and that (2) the testimony concerned an extraordinary claim that is completely contrary to reality as we know it through our own personal experiences are sufficient for any reasonable person to reject it. Only a very gullible person would think that hearsay testimony that a dead person had returned to life should be accepted as factual. If someone today told you that somebody had told him that someone had risen from the dead, how much credence would you give to such a claim? Not very much, I'm sure, but if such a claim is 2,000 years old, you swallow it hook, line, and sinker. Is that your idea of rationality?
THEO
You claimed that this was a rudimentary fact even used by Judge Wapner on People's Court.
TILL
Yes, that's right. Did you watch this program very much? If so, you surely heard him say this, because it was a comment that he made fairly often when any of the litigants would say that someone else had told them such and so.
THEO
Are you going to use this courtroom scenario only in the area of hearsay and not in the the area of proving these men to be liars "beyond a reasonable doubt?"
TILL
By "these men," I assume you mean the apostles. In the first place, I don't have to prove that they were liars, because I don't even have their firsthand testimony. I don't know, for example, what, if anything, the apostle Peter said on the day of Pentecost, because we have no testimony from Peter that he said what Luke said that he said. In the book of Acts, we have only the secondhand word of Luke that Peter said such and so and that Paul said such and so, etc. Secondhand testimony is hearsay and by its very nature of being hearsay is widely recognized as inherently weak evidence. I will repeat again that when you add to the hearsay nature of most of the "testimony" in the NT the fact that most of it also was concerned with extraordinary claims, the only sensible conclusion for a rational person to reach is that this kind of "evidence" is far too insufficient to prove the claims involved. Would you mind telling us if you apply to other ancient documents the same standards that you apparently apply to the Bible? In other words, if nonbiblical ancient documents contain various supernatural claims, do you just accept these as truth? If not, what standards do you use to determine what is true and what is not true when extraordinary claims are found in ancient documents?
THEO
As for the claim about Emperor Vespasian, I do not know whether he healed a blind man with a withered hand. I have never looked at those historical documents.
TILL
I can give you the exact references. The claim by Tacitus can be found in *The Histories* (Penguin Books, 1995, translated by Kenneth Wellesley, p.272), and the parallel claim by Suetonius is in *The Twelve Caesars* (Penguin Books, 1984, translation by Robert Graves, p. 284). If you would like me to, I can post various miracle claims that Tacitus, Suetonius, and Josephus made in their nonbiblical writings, as well as Islamic miracle claims, so that you can tell us which ones you accept as historical truth and which ones you reject and why. That would give us an idea of whether you know anything about this subject at all or if you are just another would-be apologist who is going to do nothing but recycle warmed-over materials from Geisler, McDowell, Archer, Arndt, and such like.
THEO
However, I must point out that you quoted this portion in response to my claim that we should more or less accept what documents say about non-supernatural events until we can prove the documents to be inaccurate. Hence, your statement about Vespasian has nothing to do with that particular argument I had made.
TILL
I will say again that you are showing that you know very little about historiography. Critics do not automatically accept the ordinary claims of ancient documents just because there is no evidence that the claims are not true. If you wish, I can forward to you articles from my journal *The Skeptical Review* in which William Sierichs discussed "nonsupernatural" claims made by Herodotus and other ancient historians, and showed that many of these claims have been rejected by modern historians.Your claim is simply not true. I realize that what you are saying is what you have heard "apologists" like Geisler and McDowell say, because I have heard them say the same thing. What they are trying to do is dupe people into believing that it is an almost universal principle of historical criticism to "give ancient documents the benefit of the doubt," so that they can later leap from the ordinary to the extraordinary in hopes that their readers and listeners will be willing to apply the same standard to these claims too. Conscientious historians, however, have never just automatically given the benefit of the doubt even to ordinary claims in ancient documents without first critically assessing these claims.
THEO
The New Testament writers had no earthly thing to gain (except martyrdom) by describing the miracles of Christ; Vespasian, on the other hand, could gain political power and prestige.
TILL
Well, in the first place, you're completely confused about who said what. I don't know of a single record that Vespasian himself left in which he claimed that he cured a blind man and a man with a withered hand. Tacitus and Suetonius were Roman historians who wrote these claims about miracles that Vespasian had allegedly performed. Furthermore, they both claimed (as you will see if you bother to check the sources cited above) that these miracles were seen by many witnesses. Furthermore, you indicate that NT writers were risking their very lives by describing miracles attributed to Jesus. I'd like to see your evidence to prove that these writers faced such dangers. I'm afraid you have been duped by too much preaching about horrible persecutions that early Christians suffered.
THEO
Also, the New Testament descriptions of events correspond to a large extent to the same events as mentioned in Josephus' "Antiquities" (e.g. the famine mentioned in Acts 11:28 is also told of in Antiquities 20:51-3, 101; Herod's death in Acts 12:23, Antiquities 19:343-52.)
TILL
Well, not exactly. The version of Herod Agrippa's death in Acts claims that because the people shouted words of praise to him after he had delivered a speech, "an angel of the Lord immediately struck him... and he was eaten of worms and gave up the ghost." The only real similarity in Josephus's account is that the crowd shouted praise to him, which caused Agrippa to see an ominous omen in the form of an owl. Agrippa interpreted this as a sign that he would die, and according to Josephus he returned to his chamber, suffered pain "in his belly for five days"and died. Nothing was mentioned about an angel of the Lord or immediacy or worms. At any rate, if your version of *Antiquities* is the same as mine, it has a footnote that discusses critical suspicions that this account may have been altered to give it at least some similarity to the account in Acts. There is nothing in Josephus's account to indicate that the supernatural was involved in the death of Agrippa, and that brings us to a point that you will be hearing quite often in this forum if you continue your effort to establish the inerrancy of the NT by pointing to characters or events that were corroborated or semi-corroborated (as in the case of Agrippa's death) by nonbiblical records. No one that I know of in this forum has ever argued that EVERYTHING in the NT is erroneous and that there is no truth at all in it. We recognize that several characters mentioned were undoubtedly real people, that many social customs referred to were accurate descriptions of the times, that geographical areas mentioned were accurate, etc. BUT--and this is an important but--there has never been any archaeological discovery or ancient record or archive found that has given unbiased, disinterested, contemporary corroboration of ANY of the many miracle claims found in the Bible. If I am wrong about this, I'd like to see the information you have that corroborates biblical miracles claims.
So try to keep in mind that when you talk about information in the Bible that has received extrabiblical corroboration, you are talking about the ordinary and not the extraordinary. That ordinary information in an ancient document would turn out to be historically accurate would not be at all surprising. There is undoubtedly much ordinary information in ancient Egyptian, Assyrian, Babylonian, etc. records that is historically accurate, but just as historians reject the fantastic and fabulous in the ancient records of Egypt, Assyria, Babylon, Greece, etc., the truly objective and impartial reader of history will reject the same type of information that is found in the Bible. The fact that something is claimed in the Bible should not give it privileged status.
THEO
There is also evidence that Luke's two volume work was written early: 1.) Acts never mentions destruction of Jerusalem--circa 70. (even though it is predicted in Luke 21:20-4!) 2.) Paul's and Peter's deaths not recorded. (prob. 64-70) 3.) The death of James, Christ's brother, is not recorded.--circa 62 (c.f. Antiquities, Book 20, Chapter 9 Section 1 in William Whiston's translation) 4.) The massacre of Christians in Rome not mentioned (circa 64.) Also, the first person plural throughout Acts indicates that it was written by someone who travelled with the Apostles and could have easily been in a position to interview eyewitnesses. The Book of John claims to be written by an eyewitness, (John 21:24 c.f. references to the "disciple that Jesus loved, no doubt a modest self-reference) and the skeptic will usually hide behind the veil of contemporary scholarship and dismiss this statement a priori.
TILL
Tell me something. If you wanted to forge a manuscript and make people think that it was written in World War II, would you refer to the assassination of John F. Kennedy or the presidency of Dwight Eisenhower or the collapse of communism in the Soviet Union?! If you'll think about what I'm asking, you should understand why I don't see your examples as any kind of substantial evidence that these books were written as early as you claim. As for John's claim that he was an "eyewitness," are you so naive that you can't see that if someone years after the event decided to write a book and give it credibility among Christians, he could easily decide to leave in it the impression that it was written by John. There is an epistle to the Laodiceans that claims that it was written by the apostle Paul, but even Christianity has rejected it. So even your own cohorts don't accept everything as authentic just because it internally claimed that it was written by persons of respect and authority. This matter is far more complex than you apparently recognize. If you stay on the list for long, you will have the opportunity to present your case and have it shot down. I'm saying this from years of experience with people like you who have come onto this list making the same claims (it's really sort of amazing how that you fellows just recycle the same old discredited nonsense) only to have their balloons burst by critical analysis of what they are claiming.
I'm going to make a final point before I post this. I noticed that a long list of messages from you came through, but I have not opened them yet. From just this one posting, I can already see that you are probably someone who intends to use the "stacking" strategy. Stacking occurs in debating when an opponent fills a speech or manuscript with a long series of unsupported or unsubstantiated assertions that he knows his opponent will not have time to reply to, so I want to tell you right at the beginning that you are talking to an old, experienced debater who knows all of the tricks. If I see that you are doing this, I'm going to take your assertions one at a time and demand that you prove them. No matter how much you may try to steer the discussion off to other assertions by trying to stack again, I won't let you do it. I'll keep bringing you back to the assertion that you have yet to prove. Now in the letter that you sent to me, you recycled that old, worn-out, discredited claim that the apostles and early evangelists were willing to suffer and die for their beliefs. I'm going to insist that you stick to this for the time being and prove that this is a true claim. If you can't prove it, then the argument with which you introduced yourself fails. Then we can go on to a second assertion and then a third and then a fourth.
Farrell Till
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